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Magnus's Top 30: Week 2 2020 (full Top 30)

Tue April 21st, 2015, 17:37

So, I finally decided to start posting my weekly top 30 chart here! The chart has existed since June 2000, with charts from January 2000 computed retroactively, I just never got around to posting it here.

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Eligibility:
To be eligible for the chart, a song must at the start of the week not be older than 365 days measured from when it got its first registered play and it must be released (or otherwise strongly associated with) the current year or the year before, where the current year is the calendar year when the week started.

All songs are eligible regardless of if they are released as singles or tracks on albums or EPs, B-sides etc. There is no limit to how early a song may chart, i.e. it is not necessary that a song has been officially released. In fact, even a private recording not available anywhere could in theory chart (although so far this has not happened and I also reserve the right to arbitrarily exclude such songs).

The original motivation for these eligibility rules was to prevent "old" songs from making random comebacks. But a consequence is of course also that it limits the maximum number of weeks a song may spend on the chart. If a song gets its first play on a Sunday (the last day of the week) and enters the chart that same week, then its maximum number of weeks (if it doesn't miss any weeks) is 54. If it gets its first play on any other day the maximum is 53. And of course, if a song enters the chart later than the first week the number will be lower. In retrospect, to avoid the 54 vs 53 issue I should have defined the maximum age to be 364 instead of 365 days. But because there actually is a song that spent 54 weeks on the chart (Diana DeGarmo – Reachin' for Heaven, in 2005-2006) it's too late to change this now.

Because the age rule is only defined in terms of release year (i.e. with no regard to the exact date) and days since I started listening, it's fully possible that a song may in fact be almost two years old when it enters the chart. For example, a song released on January 1st 2016 will still be allowed to enter the chart week 52 2017 (which starts on 25th December) if I didn't listen to it for the first time until 26th December 2016 or later. In this case the song will only be able to chart a single week because week 1 2018 starts on 1st January 2018 and then the song no longer fulfills the rule that it must be released the current year or the year before.

In addition to making sure that the chart is always "fresh" (relatively speaking) I like the fact that when a song's eligibility has run out its chart performance will never again change and it becomes possible to talk about it in the past tense, instead of never knowing if a song might return.

Score:
The chart ranking is based on a score that is computed mathematically from the number of registered plays. Weeks are ISO calendar weeks, i.e. Monday through Sunday (which means the chart is usually, but not always, updated the following Monday). The score is computed as the number of plays the current week plus half of the score (not number of plays) from the previous week. All plays the current week are always included even when the song will be ineligible the following week.

The motivation for this system is to make the chart more "chart-like" than it would be if it were based on plays only that single week. I experimented with this in 2000 and didn't like the random action that often happened, especially during weeks with few plays overall. By including half of the score from the previous week there is never any problem with not having enough songs to fill the chart and when a low-volume week follows one or more higher volume weeks instead of a near-random chart the chart will tend to be mostly unchanged. It makes sense to me that if I listen a lot (often several hundred) times to a song one week it should still get some credit for that the following weeks even if it then gets only a few or no plays at all. I'm extremely happy with how this has worked out in practice and have never felt any need for "manual intervention". This rule definitely does not prevent songs from entering directly at #1 because hot new songs tend to be played so much that other songs' score from the week before usually aren't nearly high enough to compete, although of course it sometimes happens that the week's most played song isn't #1 that week.

A special feature of my chart is that for songs that got their first play the current year, the number of plays and the resulting score is usually hidden until the end of the year, i.e. even I don't get to see them. There are some exceptions to this, for example when I sync the numbers from my iPod (which tend to account for less than 10 percent of total listening) I usually can't avoid seeing the number of plays there (since the previous sync), and especially early in the year it's often possible to accurately estimate the number of plays from the score of older songs still charting (for example, if there are old songs at #2 and #4 with a score of 100 and 90 respectively and the #3 is a new song that was first played that week, then I will be able to tell that it was played at least 90 and at most 100 times, but notice that this will can never never put an upwards limit for #1!) But I don't use Last.FM or anything else that would allow me or anyone else to see the numbers in real-time. This means that my weekly chart as well as my year end charts are often exciting and contain surprises even to myself! Another advantage is that I avoid exposure to too much unnecessary detail during the year, while still being able to see everything when the year is over. (This rule will be suspended if it becomes likely that I won't survive until the end of the year or in similar extreme circumstances.)

When there are several versions of what is essentially the same song, the general rule is that I will combine them to a single entry and usually use either the first available or the most common title. This includes remixes as well as when the lyrics exist in several languages. If a new version is released years later than the original, the song will not be allowed to chart again, i.e. eligibility is always counted from the first version. Of course, this does not include cover versions made by a dfferent artist, those are treated as completely separate songs.

Mobile plays were first included in May 2005 when I got my first iPod. Before that mobile plays were simply excluded (i.e. I never tried to count them manually), but I didn't listen as much on-the-go those years as I've done later.

Unlike for my year end charts, there is (for historical reasons) no defined tie-breaking rule for the weekly chart. I.e. if two or more songs happen to have the exact same score the order between them is "random". In practice, it appears that the song that was entered into my database first will be placed higher, but since this is not defined it's not guaranteed to always work that way. However, because I tend to listen a lot and because of how the score system works it's not terribly common that two songs have the exact same score. It mostly only happens for new entries that enter low and had no plays the previous week. (For the albums chart (especially with the new rules), it becomes even more unlikely that two albums have the exact same score.)

Male artists are allowed on the chart! From a quick glance at my chart, one might sometimes be led to believe that it is a "female only" chart, but that is (of course) not the case. It just so happens that I generally prefer to listen to female artists and this has also had a self-reinforcing effect over the years because I search more for new music by female artists.

Rules for Albums Chart from week 5 2016 onwards

Eligibility:
The eligibility rules for my albums chart are intentionally totally different from those for the songs chart! There is no limit to how old an album is allowed to be, how many weeks it may chart or how many times it may re-enter. On the other hand, an album must have been officially released (anywhere in the world) before it is allowed to chart. It does not matter if the release is physical or only in electronic ("digital") format.

To be eligible for the chart, at least three songs on the album must have been played at least two times each (in total, not the current week). EPs are eligible if they fulfill this rule, as long as an album with the same song(s) has not yet been released. The number of tracks is irrelevant; if for example there is an EP with five tracks but where four of them are remixes of the same song that EP will never be allowed to chart because it's not possible for three different songs to be played, i.e. plays for different versions of the same song are combined in the same way as for the songs chart. A Best Of or Greatest Hits album or some other type of compilation is in general not allowed to chart and the reason for that is that the songs on such an album instead contributes to the original album where they were first included. An exception to this is if there are three or more songs on a Best Of album that were not included another album, then the Best Of album will be allowed to chart based on plays for those new songs only. A soundtrack will be eligible only if an artist appears on at least 80 percent of the included songs. If that is the case it will be treated as an artist album by that artist (unless the songs have already been released on another album). In practice, for an album/EP/soundtrack to be able to chart I have to manually make a note of the release date which I will usually do only if I have actually listened to it. This means that sometimes an album/EP that would otherwise be eligible won't appear on the chart simply because I don't know or don't care that it exists.

Score:
The score is computed similarly to for the songs chart but with a twist to favour albums where I have listened a lot to many songs. The number of plays for the songs included on (any version of) the album are summed and then multiplied by something I call the breadth factor. How this breadth factor is computed will be described below. In general this breadth factor will change from week to week, but it depends only on the total plays up until and including that week, regardless of when they happened. After the summed plays have been multiplied by the breadth factor the total score is that number plus half of the score from the week before, i.e. if the breadth factor is 1.0 then this is exactly the same as for the songs chart. The score is computed independently of the eligibility rules which means that when an album has just been released but some songs on it were already played previous weeks then those weeks when the album was not yet released will still contribute to the total score in exactly the same way as if it had already been released. This means that in theory an album that has just been released could enter the chart at #1 without a single play that week! (If one or more songs on it were already available and played a lot before, especially if it was the weeks immediately before.)

Note that while these new rules were not applied retroactively to the older charts, the charts for week 5 2016 onwards are computed as if the new rules applied earlier, i.e. for example the half of the score from week 4 that is used for the chart week 5 is not the half of the score on the actual week 4 chart but half of the score as it would be if week 4 had already used the new rules!

The Breadth Factor:
It's not really necessary to understand exactly how this is computed so unless you like a little math I recommend completely skipping this part! It's enough to know that the more evenly distributed the plays are among the songs on the album the closer the breadth factor will be to 1.0. If just one song on the album has been played it will be 0.1 which is the lowest possible breadth factor for an album that has non-zero total plays (but because at least three songs on the album must have been played at least two times, an album that is charting can never have exactly 0.1 but only approach that value). Note that unlike the total plays and the score the breadth factor for an album is visible to me immediately when the chart has been computed (rather than up to 12 months later). I decided to make this so because for example this can be a useful hint that I should try and check out an album again if the breadth factor is unusually low.

This description first assumes an album with ten songs. I will describe later what happens for albums (including EPs) with fewer or more songs. First, an average of the number of plays for the ten songs is computed, but it's not the usual average (called the arithmetic mean) but a special square root average. The square roots of the number of plays for each song are added. This sum is divided by 10 and then squared (multiplied by itself), so that the dimension is again "plays" and not "square root of plays". This means that songs that have more plays than the average will affect the average less than if the ordinary arithmetic mean was used (it's sort of the opposite of the popular RMS average where high values will affect the average more). Then for each of the ten songs, we first compute the ratio between the number of plays and the average. If that ratio is 1 or less, i.e. the song had fewer than or up to the average number of plays, the number of plays is added as-is. If it is higher, then we instead add the square root of the ratio multiplied by the average. The resulting sum is then divided by the total number of plays and the result is the breadth factor. So the square root is used twice, first when computing the average and then when adding the plays for songs that have more plays than the average. To make this completely clear, let's look at a couple of examples. Say that all ten songs have been played the same number of times, say 9 times. To computed the average we then add up the square roots of this number, i.e. 10 * 3 = 30, divide this by 10 and get 3, then multiply this by itself and get 9. So, not surprisingly, the square root average when all songs have the same number of plays is the same as the ordinary average. Of course, this means that in the next step every ratio will be 1.0 and the sum is also just the ordinary sum of all the plays, which leads to a breadth factor of 1.0. We may call this "perfect breadth". Now let's change it so instead nine of the songs have only 4 plays but the tenth has 54. The total number of plays is still the same, 90. The square root average now becomes 9 * 2 + 7.3485 (where the last number is the rounded square root of 54) = 25.3485, divided by 10 and then squred gives 6.4255. Now the ratio will be less than 1 (0.6225) for the first nine songs so we just add their play counts (4). For the tenth song the ratio becomes 54 / 6.4255 = 8.4040. We take the square root of this = 2.8990 and multiply this by the average = 18.63. This is the number we now use instead of the actual number of plays (54) and the sum becomes 9 * 4 + 18.63 = 54.63. This divided by the total plays (90) is the breadth factor which works out to 0.607. (These computations for the actual albums are of course done automatically by a computer program so this will still work in the future even if I forget what a square root is!)

Note that with this algorithm (unlike the much simpler one I used for my albums YEC 2015) no play is ever completely "wasted"; the breadth factor will go down if a single song gets more plays relative to the other songs but it won't go down so much that the total score will completely stop increasing. It's definitely possible that an album can still be successful on the chart with a single song that's gotten a lot of plays and only a nominal amount (enough to be eligible) of plays for the rest, but it won't be so easy as it was before.

Now let's see how albums with fewer or more than ten songs are treated. For fewer songs we simply treat it (in the computation of the breadth factor) as if it had ten songs where the additional songs have zero plays. The implication of this is that if an album, or EP, actually has fewer than ten songs then its breadth factor can't reach 1.0 even if the plays are perfectly evenly distributed. For example, for an EP with only five songs, if all of them have the same number of plays the breadth factor will be 0.5 and for a three-song EP just 0.3. This is intentional because I want the chart to primarily be an albums chart that won't run the risk of being completely dominated by EPs. It's still definitely possible for EPs to have success with these rules simply because it's common that some songs get so many plays that the total score will be high even with a low breadth factor.

To compute the breadth factor for an album with more than ten songs, we first sort the songs in order of decreasing number of plays, then sum the plays for the 11th and later songs and distribute them evenly among the first ten. This means that for example if we have an album with 15 songs where 10 songs have 10 plays each and the other five have 4 this will be equivalent to an 10-song album where each song has 12 plays. This means that for the breadth factor to be exactly 1.0 it's only necessary that the ten most played songs have the same number of plays and for the rest of the songs the distribution won't matter. Why did I decide to do it like that instead of just using the above computation over all of the album songs? There are actually two distinct reasons for this. The first is that I don't want to punish an album for having additional songs, even if those songs are crap and only get a single play. Because I typically never actually listen to physical CDs I can always just exclude/delete songs that I don't want to listen to. So it would feel wrong that an album would get a lower score just because it includes additional unlistenable songs. (Note that this won't happen for short albums either, for example 9 great songs and 1 crap won't be worse (actually a tiny bit better, but I can live with that) than an album with 9 great songs and no more.) The second reason is that the number of songs on an album sometimes increases over time, as new bonus tracks and re-release tracks become available. This would be a mess to handle if the breadth factor was computed over all tracks because I would either have to keep track of exactly when the number of tracks change or have the breadth factors change retroactively. With the procedure above this issue is completely avoided and additional tracks that appear at a later time can only give a contribution (and never a negative one) from the point in time where I start listening to them.

Note that the breadth factor is always computed for the total plays up to and including the current week, never just for the current week separately (except of course if this is the very first week the album gets any plays). What this means in practice is that if an album has had good breadth historically it can get success on the chart a specific week even if I only listened to a single song that week. While this will cause the breadth factor to go down (usually just slightly, unless I listen a huge amount compared to the total plays before) it won't explicitly punish an album because it had poor breadth that specific week. I think this makes sense because if an album has had good breadth historically it means I still like the entire album even if some week I only listen to one of the songs on it. Also, one thing I try to avoid is having my charts influence what I listen to (instead of the other way around) and there would be a big risk of that happening if I knew that listening to a certain song on an album could give a much bigger boost to the album that week than if listened to some other song. (This effect still exists but is tiny compared to what it could be with a different system.)

As you can see, I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to design this so it won't cause any unforseen problems and so I hopefully won't ever feel the need to change the rules again!

Rules for Albums Chart week 1 2000 – week 4 2016

The rules up until week 4 2016 differed from the current rules in the following way: There was no breadth factor, i.e. it worked as if the breadth factor was always 1.0 and it didn't matter how the plays were distributed among the songs on the album. In addition, two thirds of the score was kept from the week before instead of only half. Furthermore, only two songs instead of three had to have at least two plays for the album to be eligible but EPs were eligible only if they had six or more songs. Also, Best Of albums could never be eligible even if they included three or more new songs.

DISCLAIMER: The fact that a song (or sometimes album) is on the chart does not have to mean that it is good in any way. Even I may not like it (anymore). It only means that at the time I listened to it a lot relative to other chart-eligible songs. My taste in music can probably be described as "weird" and I often joke that it hasn't changed since I was 8 years old (which is somewhat true). Also, a song not charting doesn't have to mean I don't like it. There have been songs in the top 100 on my year end chart that never charted on the weekly chart. My listening habits often vary a lot from week to week. The record low score for #1 is just 7.1 (week 1 2001) while the record high for #30 (excluding 2016) is 32.0 (week 12 2015). And of course, the reason a song isn't on the chart could also be that I simply haven't discovered it (or, even though extremely rare nowadays, that I have heard and liked it but don't have it available to listen to).

Last edited by Magnus; Wed April 3rd, 2019, 09:57.
Reason: tried to fix the formatting errors caused by the forum update

Love these
Great to see Asley so high, OTSG is such a great song, so catchy and sooooo feel good.
You're a Carrie fan too? That's great, Little Toy Guns is brilliant, really nice song.
Love the Kelly entries, are you liking the new album? I think it's great and the three songs on your chart are some of the highlights.

Love these
Great to see Ashley so high, OTSG is such a great song, so catchy and sooooo feel good.
You're a Carrie fan too? That's great, Little Toy Guns is brilliant, really nice song.
Love the Kelly entries, are you liking the new album? I think it's great and the three songs on your chart are some of the highlights.

About Carrie, no can't really say I'm a proper fan since most of her songs have failed to enter my chart (her biggest hit is So Small from 2007, reached #11). Little Toys Guns is probably my subjective favorite among all of the songs by her that I've heard.

I like the new Kelly Clarkson album and about half of the songs from it charted. However, I like some of her previous albums more and even Heartbeat Song, despite spending three weeks at #1 in the beginning of the year, is pretty far behind her very best.

Love these
Great to see Ashley so high, OTSG is such a great song, so catchy and sooooo feel good.
You're a Carrie fan too? That's great, Little Toy Guns is brilliant, really nice song.
Love the Kelly entries, are you liking the new album? I think it's great and the three songs on your chart are some of the highlights.

About Carrie, no can't really say I'm a proper fan since most of her songs have failed to enter my chart (her biggest hit is So Small from 2007, reached #11). Little Toys Guns is probably my subjective favorite among all of the songs by her that I've heard.

I like the new Kelly Clarkson album and about half of the songs from it charted. However, I like some of her previous albums more and even Heartbeat Song, despite spending three weeks at #1 in the beginning of the year, is pretty far behind her very best.

Good, I hope it peaks at #1

Carrie is one of my favourite singers, It’s nice you like some of her songs. Glad you like Little Toy Guns.

Yeah I prefer most of Kelly’s older album to Piece By Piece tbh, the only album’s I consider it better than are My December & her debut.

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Unfortunately, as much as I like the song this most likely won't happen, at least not in the near future. Its timing kinda sucks because I'm completely nuts about my current #1 (possibly my favorite song in almost two years) and Stine Bramsen's ballad at #2 is also very strong. Anything is possible later on though. It could reach number 3 or 4 now, fall off the chart and then make a comeback in January and reach #1 in the first week of March 2016. Stranger things have happened.

Originally posted by IrishLamb

Yeah I prefer most of Kelly’s older album to Piece By Piece tbh, the only album’s I consider it better than are My December & her debut.

This is pretty much exactly how I feel too! Assuming we completely exclude the Christmas album.

Need to check out that Invader Girl song, i really liked "Starting Fires"

Thank you for commenting! Yeah, if you liked the brilliant Starting Fires you will probably like Stuck On Me too! It's available in Spotify and on YouTube (with a video, but the song itself is much better than the video).

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Thank you for commenting! You probably would have really liked the chart for week 43 2011; Kelly then had 17 of the 30 spots, including the entire top 8! Compared to that the new album is a bit of a flop, but I still like it.

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I just listened to your #1 and it's nice. I guess it's what most people would call cheesy, but I can definitely appreciate it.

Thanks for commenting, and for listening to my current #1! Yeah, I understand that people would call it that and I don't mind. I realize the target audience for it (the TV show and the album/soundtrack it's from) is far away from most people who hang out here (including myself). But I often like cheesy! Back in 2005-2006 I even had six #1 songs by someone named Brie . (And most of those songs I still like.)

For the first time ever, there are two new entries with the exact same title, Fly! It has happened a handful of times before that two songs on the chart had the same title, but not that both songs entered the chart the same week. Avril Lavigne gets her 66th hit on the chart and is now 11 songs ahead of anyone else (Taylor Swift) in that regard. All in all, four songs with the title Fly have now charted, but there are actually eight other titles that are more common. The most common titles are Run, Shine and What If with six songs each.

Yeah, I started to log all my listening on 19th December 1999, with software I developed myself, and turned that data into a weekly chart in June 2000. I had always been interested in charts but found it too much work to create weekly charts "manually"; in 1993-1999 I only did end of year charts with just 10 positions.

I like Fly (I assume you mean the Avril one ), although it feels a bit "under-produced" for my taste. If the entire song sounded like the bridge it would for sure have been a top 10 hit, now it probably won't reach the top 10 and may already have peaked.

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Great to see In To Something Good is still doing great so close to #1.
Nice seeing Little Toy Guns still in there, it's a great song.

It's close to #2 (closer than I thought it would be a week ago), but not close to #1. There is likely a bigger gap in score between #1 and #2 than between #2 and #30. Little Toys Guns has really been underplayed ever since I first started listening to it. Unless I find a bunch of new very good songs very soon it will probably reach the upper half of the chart for the first time next week!

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Great to see In To Something Good is still doing great so close to #1.
Nice seeing Little Toy Guns still in there, it's a great song.

It's close to #2 (closer than I thought it would be a week ago), but not close to #1. There is likely a bigger gap in score between #1 and #2 than between #2 and #30. Little Toys Guns has really been underplayed ever since I first started listening to it. Unless I find a bunch of new very good songs very soon it will probably reach the upper half of the chart for the first time next week!

That's ok, #2 is still amazing
Glad to hear that Lityle Toy Guns might move up a bit next week.

Milestone reached: 800 charts since the beginning! 3502 songs have been seen on the chart, with 205 songs reaching the top spot. There are five new entries on this week's chart, one of which was very hot at the beginning of the week and enters at #4. On To Something Good reaches #2 on its 4th week and Little Toy Guns finally cracks the top 10 on its 8th week!

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Good to see the climb for Carrie's "Little Toy Guns", it's a great song

Thanks for commenting! I don't know why it took me song long to really appreciate this song. Positive comments from people here probably helped to make it finally happen. It's very rare that it takes 8 weeks for a song to become a top 10 hit on my chart; usually if a song doesn't enter in the top 10 or quickly climbs there, it will never be.

Great to see Fly by Maddie & Tae It’s great, Have you heard Girl In A Country Song?
OTSN still at #2 Glad to see you’re still loving it.

Yeah, Girl In A Country Song charted last year, reached #25 the last week of November. That was/is a fun song and it might have become a bigger hit if I had discovered it last summer when it was released. Fly is so different but I really like the sound.

This week's highest new entry is Goodbye by the Swedish female duo RoxSo. This is quality summery bubblegum pop! Early in the week it looked like this song might even become #1, but in the end Dove's song keeps the top spot with comfortable margin. Killing All My Darlings by Swedish singer Maria Hazell makes a very strong climb from #27 to #5. In the lower half of the chart three artists make spectacular comebacks. Italian (?) singer Annalyse, Norwegian electro-pop band Briskeby and Austrian singer Christina Stürmer have had a single song each on the chart before, in 2005, 2001 and 2005 respectively (Woodstock, Propaganda and Engel fliegen einsam). Comebacks from decade-long absence are rare and three of them the same week is probably unique.

It's rare, but not unheard of, that a song that spent 6 weeks at #1 falls off the chart after just 12 weeks. It's extremely likely that this song will re-enter the chart at some point, for example it's very common that last year's biggest songs invade the chart again early in the new year (and it could also happen much sooner).

Great to see Biscuits enter your chart Glad you like it.
Nice rise for Little Toy Guns, its doing great.
I’m glad On To Something Good is holding relatively steady too.

I think I liked Biscuits from the first time I heard it, it just didn't stand out that much at first and I tended to forget about it a little. There is very tough competition currently, lots of songs I really like that are below #30 (I could extend the number of positions but have stuck with 30 for 15 years so that's not an easy decision...). I'm a bit surprised myself how much I've been listening to Little Toy Guns recently; if you had asked me a week ago I would not have guessed it would continue climbing as high as #6 (and it actually passed six other songs that were higher placed last week). On To Something Good got unlucky that I discovered a new song that I went a bit crazy about. It's about as strong now as it was last week at #2.